Multi-Criteria Mission Planning for a Solar-Powered Multi-Robot System

Recent years have witnessed a tremendous growth of interest in multi-robot system which can execute more complex tasks compared to single robot. To improve the operational life of multi-robot system and address challenges in long-duration mission, the solar-powered multi-robot system has been demonstrated to be an effective solution. To ensure efficient operation of solar-powered multi-robot system, we propose a multi-criteria mixed integer programming model for multi-robot mission planning to minimize three objectives including traveling distance, traveling time, and net energy consumption. Our proposed model is an extension of multiple vehicle routing problem considering time window, flexible speed, and energy sharing where a set of flexible speeds are proposed to explore the influence of robot’s velocity on energy consumption and solar energy harvesting. Three sets of case studies are designed to investigate the tradeoffs among the three objectives. The results demonstrate that heterogeneous multi-robot system: 1) can more efficiently utilize solar energy and 2) need a multi-criteria model to balance the three objectives.